The Foundation Capital partner is at the head of a new generation of Silicon Valley VC’s who did not descend from the heights of finance, but rose through the ranks of design. And, he believes, we're entering the century of the designer-founder.

We don’t usually think of venture capitalists as the “creatives” in today’s economy—at best these stolid investors
enable
creatives by providing them with the financial backing and the management advice to make their ideas happen.

Think again! Foundation Capital partner Steve Vassallo is at the head of a new generation of Silicon Valley VC’s who did not descend from the heights of finance, but rose through the ranks of design. 99U met with Vassallo in his office at Foundation Capital in Menlo Park to learn about about his background, his motivation, and his future vision.

Steve, let’s begin by figuring out who you are. You took a degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford, but now you are working as a venture capitalist. Can you connect the dots?

I have been a maker since before I can remember, whether it was building crazy Lego models or starting my own business (Steve’s Snowblowing Service—I still carry the card in my back pocket). At Stanford I was planning to get a Ph.D. in robotics and mechatronic systems, but I got sidetracked into a course in “Visual Thinking” where I learned about drawing and sketching, prototyping and need-finding, and creative problem-solving in small teams. That was the beginning of my discovering product design as a discipline.

I then spent five years at IDEO designing sunglasses for Nike, a bun toaster for McDonalds (I think I’m the only venture capitalist who has ever taken a course at McDonald’s Hamburger University), and anesthesia delivery devices. My last project at IDEO was Cisco’s VoIP system; I had to go head-to-head with Cisco engineers who made switches and routers that sit in closets and data centers and who didn’t know the first thing about consumer products, like a phone that might touch a person’s face 100 times a day. We had to educate them about the behaviors we saw in the field—at call centers, trading floors, cubicles—behaviors that if you just sat at your desk you could have never imagined.

But I was never crazy about the time-and-materials model of consulting, so I decided to apply to the Stanford Business School. I spent two years learning about “the business thing,” which I knew nothing about.

Eventually, I joined the team at Foundation Capital—first as an entrepreneur-in-residence, then as a partner—and I found it to be the most stimulating job on the planet. I meet maybe 20 new entrepreneurs a week, and I can’t help but be compelled by the mission they are on. They have thrown themselves into an idea and they’re just not gonna stop until their vision comes to pass. That’s a pretty amazing thing to be around all day.

Before 2013, Pinterest only accounted for about 2 percent of global social-mediated sales, but by May 2014 that was up to about 23 percent.
[66]
People use social media sites like Pinterest to direct or guide their choices in products. A study from October 2016 found that 60% of Pinterest users are women.
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Many businesses use Pinterest Analytics to investigate whether the time spent on the social networking site is actually producing results or not. Through the access of Pinterest Analytics, companies receive insight to data via , which makes it easier for the businesses using this method to closely engage with the consumer population on Pinterest.
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Pinterest Analytics is much like
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. It is a created service that generates comprehensive statistics on a specific website's traffic, commonly used by marketers.
Pins
,
pinners
,
repins
, and
repinners
are some aspects of user data that Pinterest Analytics provides. It also collects data that depicts the percentage of change within a specific time, to determine if a product is more popular on a specific day during the week, or slowly becoming unpopular. This data helps marketing agencies alter their strategies to gain more popularity, often changing the visual content to appeal to the Pinterest community. The "Most Clicked" tab in Pinterest Analytics demonstrates products that are more likely to sell. According to a study by Converto, in April 2012, Pinterest drove more social media-originated e-commerce sales than
Facebook
or
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.
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Globally, the site is most popular with women. In 2012, a report found that 83% of the global users were women.
[71]
By 2016 the proportion of women users was lower at 60%.
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Britain, however, is an exception. As of March2012
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, 56% of the users were male and their age profile was different too, being about 10 years younger than in the U.S., where the predominant age range was typically 35–44.
[72]
In terms of age distribution, the Pinterest demographic closely resembles the U.S. Internet population.
[73]

A team of scientists wanting to discover the machine's military capabilities is monitoring the equipment as Michael plays Lillian's final tape. They have Gordy also experience the tape, but Landon ignored the advice of the monitoring staff that Micheal has made modifications to his playback terminal. As such Gordy is killed offscreen for monitoring the tape unauthorized whilst Landon and the others watch on in surprise.

Michael's playback is cut short by Hal, but having witnessed a digital
near-death experience
makes Michael curious to see the entire tape. Alex has the recording locked away and tells Michael he will not be allowed to view it. When he returns to work, Michael walks in on Landon Marks and a team of outsider technicians going through his research records and protests to Alex who responds by firing Michael and Karen.

Michael attempts to hack into the lab's computers. Hal advises him to look under "Project Brainstorm", a program the military has created to re-develop their invention for torture and
brainwashing
. Michael and Karen's son Chris, wanting to experience the special device, is inadvertently exposed to one such tape, causing him to have a
psychotic experience
which results in his hospitalization—there Michael learns of Gordy's fate and deduces that Alex was behind his murder.

Rather than see his creation perverted, Michael vows to destroy his work and enlists the help of Karen and Hal. Michael and Karen head to the
Pinehurst Resort
and, realizing they are under surveillance, stage a fight that results in Karen leaving for Hal's house. As the two feign reconciliation over the phone, Michael accesses the Brainstorm computer via another phone line, while Karen hacks into the system and sabotages the robots that manufacture the interface terminals.

Karen shuts down the security system, locking the staff outside and enabling Michael to load Lillian's tape and experience it uninterrupted. With the plant in chaos, Robert Jenkins orders Michael's arrest. Michael escapes their agents and drives to a phone booth at the
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. He reconnects with the computers and accesses the final part of the tape, beyond the point of Lillian's physical death.

Karen leaves the house to meet with Michael. Hal and his wife, Wendy, send the last of Karen's commands to the company computers, shutting down the plant.

Karen arrives at the Wright Brothers Memorial while the tape is playing. Michael bears witness to the
afterlife
, experiencing a brief vision of before traveling away from Earth and through the universe, even after the tape ends. He ultimately has visions of angels and departed souls flying into a great cosmic Light, which seems to be
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. Michael then collapses. Karen sobs, believing him dead. She pleads for Michael to stay alive. Awakening from the experience, he weeps with joy and embraces Karen.

A useful distinction for people thinking about act consequentialism in general and act utilitarianism in particular is the distinction between a criterion of rightness and a decision procedure (
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). A criterion of rightness tells us what it takes for an action to be right (if it’s actions we’re looking at). A decision procedure is something that we use when we’re thinking about what to do. As many utilitarians have pointed out, the act utilitarian claim that you should ‘act such that you maximize the aggregate wellbeing’ is best thought of as a criterion of rightness and not as a decision procedure. In fact, trying to use this criterion as a decision procedure will often fail to maximize the aggregate wellbeing. In such cases, utilitarianism will actually say that agents are forbidden to use the utilitarian criterion when they make decisions.

There’s nothing inconsistent about saying that your criterion of rightness comes apart from the decision procedure it recommends. We can imagine views where the two come apart even more strongly than they do under utilitarianism. Imagine a moral theory that had the following as a criterion of rightness:

No Thoughts Too Many (NTTM)
: An action can only be right if it is not the result of a deliberative process about what is right to do.

If we assume that trying to use NTTM as a decision procedure would itself constitute a deliberative process, then the NTTM criterion of rightness is inconsistent with using NTTM as a decision procedure.

We can think of more mundane examples of criteria of rightness that won’t always recommend themselves as decision procedures. Suppose that a criterion of rightness for meditating is to clear your mind of thoughts, but that people who try to clear their mind of thoughts are worse at clearing their mind of thoughts than people who use other techniques, such as focussing on their breath.
‘Clear your mind of thoughts’ might be a good criterion of rightness for meditation, but a bad decision procedure to use by the lights of that criterion.
Or suppose that you are holding a gun with a misaligned sight. The criterion of rightness might be ‘hit the target’ while it’s better to use ‘hit 2ft to the right of the target’ as your decision procedure. (An interesting class of examples of this sort involve what
Jon Elster
calls ‘states that are essentially by-products’, such as being spontaneous. Thanks to Pablo Stafforini for pointing this out.)

So when is it good to accept or use ‘act such that you maximize the aggregate wellbeing’ as a decision procedure? The simple answer, if we assume act utilitarianism, is: whenever doing so will maximize the aggregate wellbeing! Of course, it can be hard for us to know when accepting or using the utilitarian criterion of rightness as a maxim would be the best thing for us to do. Perhaps most of us should never use it as a decision procedure.

What are the reasons for thinking that ‘act such that you maximize the aggregate wellbeing’ is a bad decision procedure? First, this is extremely cumbersome as a decision procedure: it is simply implausible that it would be best for us to stop before taking every step forward or before buying every can of soup to consider how these things affect the aggregate wellbeing. For everyday tasks, it makes sense to have simpler maxims to hand. Second, it’s easy to apply it naively. When we try to think about all of the outcomes of our actions, we often fail to take into account those that aren’t obvious. An example of this fault can be seen in the classic
naive utilitarian
who promises to watch your purse and then, as soon as a needy stranger comes along, gives your purse to them. The immediate impact of their action might be to transfer money from you to the needy stranger, but doing so undermines the trust that people can have in them in the future. Moreover, in order to do a lot of good in the world, people need to co-operate, and it’s virtually impossible for people to co-operate without trust and honesty norms being in place. Third, explicitly using ‘act such that you maximize the aggregate wellbeing’ as a maxim can alienate us from those we care about. Very few people would be happy to think that, while talking to them, their friends are calculating how much moral good the conversation is generating.

There are definite costs to using the utilitarian criterion of rightness as a decision procedure. But sometimes these costs are not in play quite so much, and sometimes the benefits of using it in deliberation might outweigh these costs. I think this might be true when we’re thinking about ‘large-scale’ decisions: where to allocate large amounts of money (e.g. annual charity donations, or government funding), what policies governments or companies should have, what to do with our life (e.g. what career, what research, or what lifestyle to pursue), or how we should advise others on these matters. These are all decisions that share several features. First, using ‘act such that you maximize the aggregate wellbeing’ in these cases wouldn’t conflict with prosocial norms like ‘don’t lie’, and so they don’t undermine trust or co-operation. Second, we can make each of these decisions slowly and with care, which is important since it is so hard to apply the criterion well. Third, they are decisions with significant impact, which means that it will be more important to try to take into account how they affect the world: the cost of a more cumbersome decision procedure can be justified when the stakes are sufficiently high. Finally, using it in these impersonal circumstances is not likely to alienate people with whom we have close relationships. It is still questionable whether most of us should try to apply the criterion of rightness as a decision procedure in these cases, but they strike me as candidates for decisions where it will sometimes be right to do so. The rest of the time, the criterion of rightness can sit like an evaluative backdrop on life that one is aware of, but not too eager to call upon in deliberation.

It seems plausible to me that someone behaving well by the lights of the utilitarian criterion of rightness will not employ it as a maxim regularly (note that we don’t need to appeal to rule utilitarianism or moral uncertainty to make this point). And many of the best people, by the lights of the act utilitarian criterion of rightness, will never have even heard of utilitarianism. For the most part, I suspect that the ideal act utilitarian would be a good friend, would try to keep promises, would aim to be honest and kind, and, when it comes to major decisions, would stop to think about how these decisions will affect the wellbeing of everyone. This kind of person seems much better for the world than the naive act utilitarian that most people are understandably put off by.